"Well, what do I do? What did you do?"

"I mostly fed off of you, remember?"

"You should have thought this through before you killed me. I'm fucked."

"We're fucked. Together. Like Romeo and Juliet, only we get to be in a sequel. Very literary, Tommy."

"Oh, that's a comfort. I can't believe you just killed me like that."

"And turned you into a superbeing, thank you very much."

"Oh, crap, there's burrito spooge all over my new sneakers."

"You can see in the dark, now," Jody said cheerfully. "Wanna try it? I'll get naked. You can look at me in the dark. Naked. You'll like it."

"Jody, I'm starving over here."

She couldn't believe that he didn't respond to the naked persuasion. What kind of monster had she created? "Okay, I'll find you a bug or something."

"A bug?! A bug!? I'm not eating a bug."

"I said there'd have to be some adjustments."

Tommy had been dealing with more than a few adjustments since he'd come west from his hometown of Incontinence, Indiana—not the least of which had been finding a girlfriend, who, while smart, sexy, and quick-witted, drank his blood and tended to fall unconscious at the exact moment of sunrise. He'd always suspected that she might have just picked him because he worked nights and could walk around during the day, especially since she'd once said, "I need someone who works nights and can walk around during the day," but now that he was a vampire, he could close the door on that insecurity and open another onto a whole new world of insecurities he'd never even considered before. The appropriate age for a vampire is four hundred years old—he should be a world-weary and sophisticated creature, his human anxieties long since overcome or evolved into macabre perversions. The problem with a nineteen-year-old vampire is that he drags all of his adolescent insecurities into the dark with him.